Dr Timothy Chisholm works in the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and is the Henslow Fellow at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. Tim also completed his PhD at the Department, in the Hunter Group, and before joining St Edmund’s, he was a member of Trinity College.
Tim research aims to develop diagnostic methods for neurodegenerative diseases, and for Parkinson’s disease in particular. Ten million people are estimated to have Parkinson’s disease worldwide, with one million new cases being diagnosed each year. However, diagnosing Parkinson’s can be very challenging. One in four patients are initially misdiagnosed, and this initial diagnosis can take months to years.
Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases are characterised by protein aggregates; clumps of misfolded protein that appear in the brain. Tim’s PhD research focused on finding new molecules that cling to these aggregates, and on developing a better understanding as to how these molecules interact with aggregates. As a Henslow Fellow Timothy is expanding on this work to study several different aspects of neurodegenerative diseases. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop a diagnostic test that can identify Parkinson’s disease both earlier and more accurately.
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Kipling’s “Iron‒Cold Iron‒is master of them all” captures the familiar importance of metals as structural materials. Yet common metals are not necessarily hard; they can become so when deformed. This phenomenon, strain hardening, was first explained by G. I. Taylor in 1934. Ninety years on from this pioneering work on dislocation theory, we explore the deformation of metals when dislocations do not exist, that is when the metals are non-crystalline. These amorphous metals have record-breaking combinations of properties. They behave very differently from the metals that Taylor studied, but we do find phenomena for which his work (in a dramatically different context) is directly relevant.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, U.K. policy-makers claimed to be "following the science". Many commentators objected that the government did not live up to this aim. Others worried that policy-makers ought not blindly "follow" science, because this involves an abdication of responsibility. In this talk, I consider a third, even more fundamental concern: that there is no such thing as "the" science. Drawing on the case of adolescent vaccination against Covid-19, I argue that the best that any scientific advisory group can do is to offer a partial perspective on reality. In turn, this has important implications for how we think about science and politics.
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